Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend/speak at the UGA Connect Conference at the University of Georgia (photos here). Karen Russell and the staff of the Grady College developed the conference to bring together industry folks from the social media world with students and professors from the area. I was joined by friends/colleagues including Constantin Basturea, Paull Young, Kevin Dugan and K.D. Paine to name a few.

Our job, to educate the students and professors about what’s next in the PR/social media sphere. The big question facing educators across the country is wow do they adapt their curriculum to teach social media? At the University of Georgia they have dedicated social media classes and have started to incorporate social media components into other courses as well.

During an academic roundtable at the end of the day a number of issues were discussed. Should social media be a separate course? Is AP Style relevant in a global blogosphere? Is PR leading the charge, with journalism playing catch-up?

I think a secondary purpose for the event was for UGA to showcase the social media skills of their students. Karen and Kaye are doing a great job teaching how to use the tools, i.e. blogging, podcasting, flickr, twitter, etc.

The UGA students did an amazing job of live-blogging/live-twittering the event. (Kaye Sweetser reminded me that I need to update my conference blogging post to included Twitter). I think I could have transported the student-event-blogging team to any PR event and we would have great online coverage.

I plan to post a recap of some of the sessions soon, as well as some thoughts from the PRSA International Conference. For now, think about that curriculum question. How should schools teach/adapt-to social media?